Wednesday, April 13, 2011

A great deal of election material is appearing through the letterbox with our mail. A Scottish election and a Westminster vote takes place on the same day, May 5th. The first is an election to vote for political party representatives for the Scottish Parliament.

There has been a Scottish Nationalist Party,(SNP)minority government for the last four years, who weirdly, got into bed and stayed in bed, in the main, with the few Scottish Conservative party parliamentarians, who, are fiercely anti some of the most profound causes dear to the hearts of the Nationalists. It’s amazing what you do to stay in power with a majority of three.

This election should be interesting in view of the current UK and Scottish political picture. You probably know that no one party in the UK elections had a clear mandate to govern in last year’s Westminster elections. To accede to government, the Conservative party had to form a coalition, which, they did with the Liberal Democratic Party, a party that has been strong in Scotland. That picture is likely to change, as the Scots did not like the Conservative party getting in by the Scottish back door through a Westminster coalition. It is paradoxical, as effectively, there has been much of the same mix in Edinburgh fronted by the SNP, though the extremes of Conservative dogma have been checked somewhat by the Nationalists; the same can be said vice-versa. Because of the current feelings of Lib-dem betrayal that persist, the general thinking is, that the SNP may make large gains.

There does not seem to have been one electoral visit planned with the English leader of the Liberal Democrats - The Deputy Prime Minister - in Scotland's Parliamentary Elections. He is viewed as too toxic for the Scottish Liberal Democrats to present to the Scottish voting public.

The other vote on the day, is for a ‘yes’ or 'no' for an Alternative Voting system (AV) in UK Westminster politics to replace the first- past-the-post voting principle that has been around since year dot. There was some concern about the vote taking place on the same day as voting for the Scottish parliamentary election. Four years ago when the minority government got in to power in Edinburgh, there were three separate votes on the same day; some ballot papers with all the candidates and their details, were longer than a toilet roll!! There were many accidental votes, many accidentally ruined papers and much confusion around a few devious descriptions on the ballot papers. You can, therefore, well understand the concern around having more than one thing to vote for at the same time.